Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

‘We’ll work it out, Scorp. Don’t worry.’

‘It’s weird,’ Scorpio frowned. ‘I’m really going outta my mind, y’know?’

I tugged a fold of hundred-rupee notes from my pocket, and gave it to him. Scorpio took it in a faltering hand, but then slipped it into a pocket concealed inside his shirt.

‘Thanks, Lin,’ he said, looking up quickly to meet my eyes. ‘I was waiting here to ask you to help me, because I haven’t been on the street. The watchman told me you were still out. But then I saw you were with Lisa, and I couldn’t let her see me. I didn’t want to ask for money in front of her. She has a high opinion of me.’

‘We all need money sometimes. And Lisa always has a high opinion of you, whether you need money or not.’

He had tears in his eyes. I didn’t want to see them.

‘Listen, you and Gemini,’ I said, leading him across the street again, ‘you guys lay up some supplies, buy some shit, and take a room at the Frantic. Stay there for a couple of days. We’ll find out who this guy is, and we’ll deal with it, okay?’

‘Okay,’ he said, shaking my hand with the tremble in his. ‘You think the Frantic’s pretty safe, yeah?’

‘The Frantic hotel is the only one that’ll take you and your lifestyle, Scorp.’

‘Oh… yeah… ’

‘This mystery man won’t get past the desk there. Not in a suit. Keep your heads down, and you’ll be safe at the Frantic until we figure this out.’

‘Okay. Okay.’

He walked away, stooping his tall frame beneath the loose fronds of the hedge. I watched him do the street guy’s night walk: slowly, nonchalantly in the pools of street light – Honest Joe, nothing to hide – then scurrying faster in the shadowed sections of the street.

I slipped a twenty-rupee note to the watchman, standing beside me, and climbed the marble stairs to the apartment. Lisa stood in the bathroom doorway while I showered, and I told her about Scorpio George’s white-haired stalker.

‘But who is this guy?’ she asked as I stepped out of the shower. ‘What does he want with the Zodiacs?’

‘I dunno. Naveen Adair, the guy I told you about before? He smells lawyer. He might be right. He’s a smart kid. One way or another, we’ll find out who this guy is.’

Dried off again, I flopped down on the bed beside Lisa, my head resting on the satin breeze of her breast. From that position I looked down along the length of her naked body to her feet.

‘Rosanna likes you,’ she said, shifting the direction of the conversation with an elegant gesture to the left with both feet.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Why? What happened with her?’

‘Nothing… happened .’

‘ Something happened when you were talking to her outside. What did you say?’

‘We just… talked about Goa.’

‘Oh, no,’ she sighed. ‘She’s nuts about Goa.’

‘So I discovered.’

‘But she does like you. No matter what you said about Goa.’

‘I… don’t think so.’

‘Oh, yeah. She certainly dislikes you, too, at the same time. But she definitely likes you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘She was angry enough to hit you, when I came out.’

‘She was? I thought we reached a good place.’

‘She was ready to hit you, so she likes you a lot.’

‘Ah… how does that work?’

‘She was angry enough to hit you, and she doesn’t even know you, see?’

I didn’t, but that wasn’t unusual: Lisa had her own way of incommunicating.

‘It’s all so clear now.’

‘Was she doing her body language thing,’ she asked, ‘when she was talking to you?’

‘What body language thing?’

‘She fakes a sore back, and starts rolling her hips in a circle. Did she do that?’

‘No.’

‘That’s good.’

‘It is?’

‘Yeah, because it’s pretty sexy, and she did it for me, and not for you.’

‘There’s a logic rolling its hips in there somewhere, I’m sure, but I’m gonna let it roll past. I did manage to read Anushka’s body language, however.’

‘A bear could read her body language,’ Lisa cut in quickly, giving me a slap on the arm.

‘Where did you say she’s performing?’ I laughed.

‘I didn’t,’ she slapped.

A seashell bracelet jangled on her wrist. It was the present I’d brought for her from Goa. She played the music of the shells, twisting her wrist for a while, and then silenced them in the clutch of her free hand.

‘Did you have a shitty time tonight? Should I be sorry I made you go, when you just got back from your trip?’

‘Not at all. I really did like your friends, and it was about time I met them. I liked Rosanna, too. She has good fire.’

‘I’m so glad. She’s not just a partner. She’s become close. Do you find her attractive?’

‘What?’

‘It’s okay,’ she said, playing with the bedcover. ‘I find her attractive, too.’

‘What?’

‘She’s clever, dedicated, brave, creative, enthusiastic, and easy to get along with. She’s really great.’

I stared along the soft coastline of Lisa’s long, slender legs.

‘What are we talking about, again?’

‘You think she’s hot,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘It’s okay. I think she’s hot, too.’

She took my hand, and moved it between her legs.

‘How tired are you?’ she asked.

I looked down at her toes, bent backwards in a fan-shaped arch.

‘Nobody’s ever that tired.’

It was good. It was always good. We shared a loving kindness that was a kind of loving. And maybe because we both knew that it would end some day, some way, we let our bodies say things that our hearts couldn’t.

I went to the kitchen to fetch a cold drink of water, and brought a glass back for her, putting it on the table on her side of the bed.

For a while I looked at her, beautiful, healthy, strong, curled into herself like a sleeping cat. I tried to imagine what the vision of love she was clinging to might look like, and how different it was from my own.

I lay down beside her and gathered my body into the contours of her dream. Her toes closed reflexively over mine in her sleep. And more honest than my mind, my sleeping body bent at the knees, pressed against the closed door of her curved back, and beat on it with the fist of my heart, begging to be loved.

Riding a motorcycle is velocity as poetry. The fine balance

between elegant agility and fatal fall is a kind of truth, and like all truth, it carries a heartbeat with it into the sky. Eternal moments in the saddle escape the stuttering flow of time, and space, and purpose. Coursing on those wheels, on that river of air, in that flight of freed spirit there’s no attachment, no fear, no joy, no hatred, no love, and no malice: the nearest thing, for some violent men, for this violent man, to a state of grace.

I arrived at the passport factory used by the Sanjay Company in a good mood. I’d taken the slow way to work that morning, and the ride had cleared my mind, leaving me with a placid smile I could feel in my whole body.

The factory was the main centre where we changed and created false passports. As the principal forger and counterfeiter of passports and other identification documents for the Sanjay Company, I spent at least some hours of most days at the factory.

I opened the door, and my motorcycle-smile froze. There was a young stranger in front of me. He put out his hand in greeting.

‘Lin!’ he said, shaking my hand as if he was pumping water from a village well. ‘My name’s Farzad. Come on in!’

I took off my sunglasses, accepted his invitation to my office, and found that a second desk had been lodged in a corner of the large room. The desk was piled high with papers and drawings.